Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing said he will donate $130 million to Israel’s leading engineering university, the Technion, to help establish a joint academic venture with a university in China’s Guangdong Province.

Technion, whose graduates form the core of Israel’s renowned start-up industry, will partner with Shantou University, to which Li has donated some $750 million over three decades, to build a technology institute and innovation center in the image of the successful Israeli school. The new school, which will be called the Technion Guangdong Institute of Technology, will be built and staffed with a $147 million grant from the provincial and municipal governments.

“If many universities in Guangdong and China do the same as Technion has been doing in Israel, an innovation-based economy will emerge,” said Shantou University Provost Gu Peihua at a ceremony in Tel Aviv on Sunday, according to a press release.

The collaboration expands the international activities of Technion, which together with Cornell University won a sought after tender in 2011 to build a research institute in New York City.

“This is one more step in turning the Technion into a university with a global presence: one in the West in New York and one in the East with Guangdong in China,’’ said Boaz Golany, Technion’s vice president of external relations and resource development.

Golany said Technion is following dozens of Western universities that have established branches in Israel. The partnership calls for a technology industrial park that Golany hopes will give Israeli start-ups a beachhead in China, a market that some Israeli exporters hope to penetrate after years of focusing on the U.S. and Europe.

Li, who has backed universities in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, has a long history of investing in the Jewish state. His conglomerate, Hutchison Whampoa, founded one of Israel’s top cellular phone service providers in the late 1990s. Li also invested in Waze, a traffic-mapping start-up recently purchased by Google for $1.1 billion. A press release said he used proceeds from the acquisition for the Technion donation, the largest ever to an Israeli university. At least half of Li’s gift will be spent in Israel.